Organised by Journalism and Media Studies Centre, The University of Hong Kong

The Environmental Performance of Media

The seminar sought to answer the question of whether journalism can contend with “the great narrative of the 21st century” – climate change, excess waste, shrinking water tables, deforestation, and massive extermination of animal and plant species.

From Earthquake to Nuclear Crisis: How the International News Media Covered the Disasters in Japan

In this media research seminar, JMSC teaching consultant, Masato Kajimoto, reviews and compares the media coverage of the recent earthquake, tsunami and radiation leak in Japan. He explores the areas of future research on similar subjects by discussing, among other things, the notion of sensationalism, the limits of parachute journalism, and the rise of web-based alternative/social media.

This seminar will review and explore current state of research on computational journalism, a critical emerging field for both the academy and the media industry. A multidisciplinary panel of journalists and computer experts shared their research projects on computational journalism, a new form of journalism that uses software, databases and algorithms to extract information for reporting.

European Politics, Media and the Public Sphere Speaker: Andras Bozoki, Professor of Political Science, Central European University, and former Minister of Culture, Hungary Date: Friday, February 18, 2011 (event details)

Andras Bozóki

Bozóki will address some of the following questions: What are the tools to enhance the democratic legitimacy of the European Union? What is the role of the media in creating a European public sphere? Is the European public sphere an illusion or a reality? What is the role of the EU in the North African “Twitter revolutions”? How does the European Union maintain basic rights in relation to the controversial, authoritarian media law of the member state Hungary? How are European identities formed in these political conflicts?

Political participation and media use in Hong Kong and China: an overview and research agenda

Fu will give an overview of the current debates on the relationship between political participation and media use and suggest some key research agenda, particularly focusing on mainland China and Hong Kong.

Filling the Gap: The Financial Media’s Role in Reducing Information Asymmetry in Markets

The financial media has come under heavy criticism for fueling asset price bubbles, failing to warn of impending busts, and an overall inability to provide useful investment advice. But there’s been very little quantitative research on how well the financial media fulfils one of its key roles: the dissemination of information to investors or, more fundamentally, telling people something they don’t know. Much of the research in this area to date has been from an economic perspective: for example, using media coverage to test how quickly asset prices change in response to new information. This paper will attempt to extend recent research involving market microstructure and information asymmetry. It tries to develop a consistent, widely applicable and reliable framework to measure how effective the financial media is in narrowing the information gap that often exists in markets between informed investors – those with private information – and ordinary investors only able to access public information. Such a framework would not only provide a quantitative measure of the usefulness of financial media, but also allow media organizations a tool to help determine what kinds of coverage are more helpful to readers.

Constructing the Pandemic: How Influenza Became Seen as a Threat to Global Health Security

For decades, influenza had occupied the “dull but worthy” category of infectious diseases. Though flu specialists emphasised the lives lost through influenza every year, and the millions of lives that had been lost in the 1918 pandemic, flu was not seen as a major public health threat. However, in the last decade, the perception of pandemic influenza grew from being seen a modest public health threat to a threat to global health security. Abraham’s research examines the political and social processes through which influenza was elevated from the realm of public health to the “high politics” of national and global security.

Risk Communication During Infectious Disease Epidemic: A case study of the influenza pandemic

The current “swine flu” influenza pandemic was an opportunity to put current principles of risk communication to the test. While there were successes in certain aspects, there were also several communication failures. The low uptake of vaccines, the suspicion that the pandemic was fabricated at the behest of the pharmaceutical industry as well as other popular suspicions in the public mind, are all indications of communication failures. What are the new concepts and tools in risk communication that need to be developed?

The Politics of Private Television Channel Ownership in Bangladesh

Speaker: Abdur Razzaque Khan, PhD candidate at the JMSC, and assistant professor at the Department of Communication and Journalism of the University of Chittagong (Bangladesh). Date: Friday, March 12, 2010 (event details)

While providing licences to private television operators, the ruling Bangladesh Nationalist Party favours its party comrades and brushes aside all rules and regulation. Without political blessing it is very difficult to get any license. This talk focuses on how and why private television channel license procedures are politicized by the ruling party in Bangladesh with a view to consolidating its power in the country.

The lecture explores the concepts of media pluralism and how to measure threats and risks to media pluralism. Professor Valcke will also present the Media Pluralism Monitor, the outcome of the Independent Study on Indicators for Media Pluralism (a major European Union project that she directed). The discussion investigates whether and how the concept of media pluralism can be used in China and Hong Kong in an era characterised by a major shift from traditional to online media.

Media Reporting and Risk Communication During and After the Wenchuan Earthquake in China

Dr Fu will present findings of his content analysis on earthquake-related newspaper stories in the first month after the earthquake struck, and of the in-depth interviews he carried out with 55 people with disabilities in a highly affected city, Deyang, Sichuan, about their media use and communication need during and after the earthquake.

List of Seminars The Environmental Performance of Media From Earthquake to Nuclear Crisis Computational Journalism: Mapping the Research Agenda European Politics, Media and the Public Sphere Political participation and media use in Hong Kong and […]

Leading American media researcher, Nick Diakopoulos, gave a talk about the impact of computing on the changing landscape of news and talked about how computer technology, social media analytics and even video games can be used for innovation […]

Computational Journalism is opening up new vistas in reporting, news production and consumption. Find out more from visiting speaker Nick Diakopoulos of Rutgers University, who lectured on latest developments at the JMSC in March.

Nick Diakopoulos, Computing Innovation Fellow at the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University, will talk to the JMSC about the impact of computing on the changing landscape of news production and consumption on […]